Recently, education game contents with advanced mobile and Web technology have been widely researched. However, considering of interaction involved for children, it is necessary user friendly interfaces and interesting interactions. In addition, it is important to design to encourage the user’s learning motivation as a way to the effect of educational game contents. Therefore, in this study, we designed and implemented the educational game contents system using inter-working between KINECT camera, PC, and android platform based humanoid robot. The designed system consisted of KINECT system for capturing hand gestures, game contents system for playing games, and android humanoid robot system for interacting with users. This system can lead to interests and willingness of users through handy interaction such as hand gestures and interesting quiz game contents. To improve effectiveness and userability, we plant to advance designed educational game contents system that can be operated on a smart TV system including a built-in camera as a further study.

This paper presents a rope modeling and verification for the robotic platform of the wall cleaning robot (ROPE RIDE). ROPE RIDE has the characteristics of climbing up and down using a rope fixed on the roof like traditional workers. In order to perform a stable operation with a wall cleaning robot, it is necessary to estimate the position of the robot in a vertical direction. However, due to the high coefficient of extension and nonlinearity of the climbing rope, it is difficult to predict the behavior of the rope. Thus, in this paper, the mathematical modeling of the rope was carried out through the preliminary experiment. Extensive experiments using different types of rope were used to determine the parameters of the constitutive equation of climbing ropes. The validity of the determined parameters of various ropes was verified through the experiment results.

In this paper, we describe a case of using robot technology in child studies to examine children’s judgement and reasoning of the life phenomenon on boundary objects. In order to control the effects of the appearance of the robot, which children observe or interact directly with, on the children's judgement and reasoning of the life phenomenon, we developed a robot similar to human. Unit experimental scenarios representing biological and psychological properties were implemented based on control of robot's motion, speech, and facial expressions. Experimenters could combine these multiple unit scenarios in a cascade to implement various scenarios of the human-robot interaction. Considering that the experimenters are researchers of child studies, there was a need to develop a remote operation console that can be easily used by non-experts in the robot field. Using the developed robot platform, researchers of child studies could implement various scenarios by manipulating the biological and psychological properties of the robot based on their research hypothesis. As a result, we could clearly see the effects of robot's properties on children’s understanding about boundary object like robots.

Recently, development of robot technology has been actively investigated that industrial robots are used in various other fields. However, the interface of the industrial robot is limited to the planned and manipulated path according to the target point and reaching time of the robot arm. Thus, it is not easy to create or change the various paths of the robot arm in other applications, and it is not easy to control the robot so that the robot arm passes the specific point precisely at the desired time during the course of the path. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a new-media content management platform that can manipulate 6 DOF industrial robot arm using 3D game engine. In this platform, the user can directly generate the motion of the robot arm in the UI based on the 3D game engine, and can drive the robot in real time with the generated motion. The proposed platform was verified using 3D game engine Unity3D and KUKA KR-120 robot.

Various robot platforms have been designed and developed to perform given tasks in a hazardous environment for the purpose of surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue, and etc. We have considered a terrain adaptive hybrid robot platform which is equipped with rapid navigation on flat floors and good performance on overcoming stairs or obstacles. Since our special consideration is posed to its flexibility for real application, we devised a design of a transformable robot structure which consists of an ordinary wheeled structure to navigate fast on flat floor and a variable tracked structure to climb stairs effectively. Especially, track arms installed in front side, rear side, and mid side are used for navigation mode transition between flatland navigation and stairs climbing. The mode transition is determined and implemented by adaptive driving mode control of mobile robot. The wheel and track hybrid mobile platform apparatus applied off-road driving mechanism for various professional service robots is verified through experiments for navigation performance in real and test-bed environment.